Workflow automation

The Workflow Management Coalition defined workflow as the computerised facilitation or automation of a business process, in whole or in part¹. It concerns procedures in which documents, information or tasks pass between participants according to a defined set of rules to achieve or contribute to an overall business goal¹. A workflow may be organised by people alone, but the Coalition's reference model is aimed at computerised support¹. A process definition lists activity steps, with computer operations, human operations, or both, and rules for how the process moves forward¹.

At run time, software creates and controls instances of that process, schedules the steps and calls the people and IT applications each step needs¹. The core piece is the workflow engine, which creates and deletes processes, schedules activities and interacts with application tools or human resources¹. The 1994 reference model names five interface areas: interchange of process-definition data, interoperability between workflow systems, interaction with IT applications, interaction with desktop user interfaces, and monitoring and metrics¹. A single process can last from minutes to days or months¹.

Google Cloud Workflows is one current product². A workflow is a series of steps written in YAML or JSON². By default, steps run one at a time, in order, until all the steps have run². The definition can use a switch, a for loop, parallel steps, subworkflows and callbacks that wait for another service to call back². It can retry HTTP calls with exponential back-offs, and a run can hold state, retry, poll or wait for up to a year². A run starts from the console or command line, from client libraries or an HTTP POST, or on a schedule with Cloud Scheduler². It can encode conditions, actions and human-in-the-loop events². Examples include tracking an order from request to fulfilment, and resource requests with approvals².

Anthropic, in a note published on 19 December 2024, uses workflow for a narrower case: language models and tools orchestrated through predefined code paths, as against agents that direct their own tool use³. In that note, workflows are the more predictable option for well-defined tasks³. The same page says much of the tooling it describes has changed since December 2024³.